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FTC Secures Rights To Examine Facebook, Possibly Investigate Google

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is gearing up to scrutinize major tech companies, with the FTC securing the rights to potentially investigate Facebook on “whether it has engaged in unlawful
monopolistic practices.”

As part of an agreement, according to the report, it will allow the Department of Justice to open a Google probe. The FTC and DoJ share authority to enforce
U.S. antitrust law, according to The
Wall Street Journal.

Google is estimated to take 37.2% of net digital ad revenue in the U.S. this year, dropping to 36.8% by 2021, according to eMarketer. Facebook will take about 22.1%
this year, creeping up slightly to 22.9% by 2021. Amazon will pick up the slack -- taking 8.% this year, rising to 11.2% in 2021.

This news, along with another event that took place during the
weekend, sent Alphabet’s stock share into decline on Monday, averaging between 5% and 6.5% lower throughout the morning.

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During the weekend Google’s cloud servers that power logins
went down, taking Snapchat, YouTube, Gmail, G Suite and other services with it.

Google first reported the problem a little after noon Pacific time on Sunday. Most media reports pointed to
outages along the East Coast, but the Midwest also was affected.

The Google Cloud Platform Status Dashboard states that the outages were contained to Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud
Networking. Both issues have been resolved.

“The network congestion issue in eastern USA, affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube has been resolved for all affected users as of
4:00pm US/Pacific” on Sunday, according to Google.

The company plans to conduct an internal investigation and make appropriate improvements to its systems to help prevent or minimize
future recurrences.